Bermuda Wants You!

While Stateside tourism boards take a break from beckoning visitors, a new twelve-month certificate invites the working-from-home set to hole up in Bermuda.

State tourism boards have ceased their siren calls in recent months, instead offering tough love in response to the pandemic. Colorado’s “Waiting to CO” anti-tourism campaign asked that would-be visitors, in lieu of actually coming to the state, post pictures of “Colorado activities” that could be safely enjoyed at home. Kayaking in the pool, perhaps? Climbing the chimney with ropes? The campaign was intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus in a state that’s had more than sixty thousand cases of ­COVID-19, while simultaneously whetting travellers’ appetites for post-­pandemic trips.

Campaigns to keep people out are not exactly new. In the seventies, an Oregon governor proclaimed, “For heaven’s sake, don’t move here.” Long before Seattle became a mecca for Kurt Cobain fans, a prescient local journalist popularized the slogan “Keep the Bastards Out!” In 2018, Nebraska introduced the catchphrase “Honestly, It’s Not for Everyone,” which actually succeeded in bringing more people to the Cornhusker State—“which had been among the least likely states for anybody to visit for a long time,” John Ricks, Nebraska’s tourism director, said recently.

Ricks, who is based in Lincoln, helped come up with “Honestly, It’s Not for Everyone,” which was inspired by a ­concept from the field of medicine. “Inoculation is what we call it,” Ricks said. “That’s where you feed off the negative ­perception.” He went on, “We’ve been fortu­nate during this COVID crisis. ­People say, ‘Go to open places, smaller cities, rural communities, places you’ve never been.’ Well, that’s our product!” Of course, if there were an uptick in cases, Nebraska could change course and tout the old perceptions of the state. As Ricks put it, “Nothing to do, flat and boring, dusty plains.”

Jimmy Im, the Brooklyn-based founder of the Web site TravelBinger, claims to have visited more hotels around the world (“six hundred and counting”) than anyone else, and has been to some forty states in his capacity as a travel professional. “And I’ve been invited to many of the rest,” he said, mentioning Nebraska. But for now he’s staying put at home, in Williamsburg. Im offered tourism boards some unsolicited slogans, to help them keep vacationers away. Florida: “Governor Ron is a Douchebag.” Iowa: “Not Enough Attractions.” California: “It’s a Natural Disaster.” Idaho: “Neo-Nazis and Whatnot.”

Telling tourists not to go somewhere—facetiously, or as a matter of life and death—is an about-face for most travel-industry professionals. “It’s hard,” Campbell Levy, a vice-president at Turner, a public-relations company with travel-related clients in two dozen states, said the other day, from his home, in Evergreen, Colorado. “The world is different than it was. The tourism business is suffering. But it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to get on a plane right now, unless you really have to.”

“Oh, that’s just all the online yoga she’s been doing lately.”
Cartoon by Millie von Platen

Lately, Levy has been pushing an alternative to Stateside travel: obtaining a twelve-month worker certificate from Bermuda. His company represents the British territory, which is situated approximately six hundred and fifty miles off the North Carolina coast and has a population of more than sixty thousand. Unlike most places, Bermuda wants visitors—its economy is dependent on them. “There’s practically no COVID there,” Levy said. (Only a hundred and seventy-­seven COVID cases have been confirmed on the island; eight are currently active.) “It’s a prime opportunity,” he added. “And they’ve got really robust testing.”

More than three hundred people from a dozen countries—including Brazil, China, South Africa, and Bangladesh—have applied for Bermuda’s certificate program, which launched in August. Certification for a twelve-month stay costs two hundred and sixty-three dollars (lodging not included). Sadie Millard, a New Yorker in her forties who works as a partner at a Wall Street brokerage firm, got a head start. She was visiting her boyfriend, who works as a civil engineer in Bermuda, when COVID hit New York, in March. “I came for the weekend, then things got crazy,” she said. Airlines began suspending outbound flights from the island, her firm closed its offices, and employees began working remotely. She decided to stay. Her partners at the firm are fine with it. Even if there were in-person meetings to attend (there are not), New York is just a two-hour flight away.

Trading her six-hundred-square-foot apartment for a house near a golf course was not a tough call. “Nothing was open in New York,” she said. “No theatre, no concerts, no anything.” Storm season has arrived, but Millard, who expects to receive her worker certificate next week, is taking her chances: “I’d rather go through a hurricane than get COVID in New York City.”

Back in Colorado, Levy couldn’t stop himself from pitching a potential future traveller on Nebraska, one of his stalled accounts. What would this tourist do there? “It’s really worth floating down a river in a livestock tank with a few buddies,” Levy said, a pastime that locals call “tanking.” He added, “But only once it’s safe again.” ♦